Tid Bit from My Diary

I will not claim this blog post as mine. To be precise, this is not even a blog post, it is a Vlog post and I did not have to sweat as my enthusiastic second grader took charge. She said, "I never won a competition in my entire life.” That’s quite a strong statement for someone who just celebrated her 7th birthday. “I am going to record it very nicely so that I will win!" she declared.   I did the editing to fit it within the allowable 90 seconds, sacrificing some important aspects of her creativity. The storyline after editing can be summarized as below: “Elsa lives in a castle. This time she has magical power to bring in rains. Her sister Ana is trapped by a dragon in a tower and the knight fails to rescue her. Elsa uses her special powers to free her sister. There is a twist to the story in the form of them getting a baby brother. … and they happily live ever after.” The video can be watched here: Elsa and the Dragon One lesson learnt during this exercise...

It’s fun to see our children grow up but another truth of life is that childhood is a very short session. It also requires positive involvement of the parents to make the childhood sweet and successful. Sometimes we get upset with the child’s behavior and immediately compare this with our own childhood. “Had we done something similar, there is fair chance that we wouldn’t be standing here right now” is a thought that crosses many a minds of our generation. The parent and child of some families even then acted like friends and were probably are the exceptions that prove the law. One of the leading topic of debate, I remember during my school days was “spare the rod and spoil the child”. This is key indicator of that our society was debating for a change.  It’s not that we are survivor of a tyrant society but looking back it appears that we did miss some fun, some joyous moment with our parents and some exciting “high five” moments. We try to be best of friends with o...

A freshness wave moves through the corporate headquarters of a multinational organization and we watch how the scenario changes. Scenario 1 There is a tensed moment in the board room as all the line managers and directors sit around the large table and wait for the big boss. The CEO has been out of the country on an extended medical emergency and in his absence the performance of his company has not been quite as expected. He has called for an urgent meeting to review the present situation. The laptop is connected to the projector with the power point presentations of each of the managers queued up while they nervously browse through hard copies of their report ... just one last glance before presenting. The office orderly, veteran of many a crisis enters the room and announces... “he is in, the car is in its driveway”, without even opening his jaws. A man in his mid fifties perfectly dressed in his imported shoes and designer's suit walks into the room.  “Good mor...

Photo Courtesy  Dabur   “I am participating in the   #FirstLove activity   at   BlogAdda   in association with Dabur “ Does your baby laugh while you massage the right legs and gets irritated if you do not start on the left soon enough. If not then definitely you are not using the right oil that makes the baby happy. After all laughing and crying are the only two expressions an infant has mastered and therefore with the slightest feeling of discomfort a cry emancipates. But that is the baby, whose happiness and anxiety  doesn't  last for long. But when parents get worried about some ailment of their baby, the anxiety seems to last for days and nights at end. Once upon a time when a baby was born in the family and the doctor said one of the legs was slightly not normal and could have trouble while walking. That statement of the doctor devastated the parents as well as the extended family. But the doctor added that some ther...

Photo courtesy  daburhoney T emptation, thy name is food. This leaves us with the challenge to challenge our tongues with tough challenges. Nobody can undermine the power of the tongue as uttering the wrong word or eating the wrong food would invariably end up in social or physical hara-kiri. But the irony of the life of us lesser mortals is that whatever food that tastes good turns out to be not healthy. We are faced with a situation similar to that of the proverbial monkeys alibi a little difference....  see no food, hear no food and eat no food. We are afraid to bet our paunch less bodies and dig into the delicious buffet spreads as we have many an example of those who did otherwise. Our outlook however changes with the advent of the first sign of tyre in the mid zone of our bodies, so to say our Madhya Pradesh. Initially we are high on the confidence level that we will get rid of the extras with some magic crash diets of protein or zero carbohydrate or by skipping...

This post is a part of  Write Over the Weekend , an initiative for  Indian Bloggers  by BlogAdda. There is one thing in common among young hostel boarders and particularly for those from engineering college. They have spent hours debating, arguing and fighting on topics ranging from anything to everything on their tryst to establish a point of views. The walls of our hostel rooms have witnessed countless ideas, arguments and logic wash down the drain by gallons of coloured liquids be it tea, coffee or hardcore alcoholic drinks. There were some who built their arguments on solid foundation of references and statistics. But my way of life is more like Winnie and always find more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like "What about lunch?”   (  A.A. Milne ,   Winnie-the-Pooh ). One of the live issues had been India’s post independence growth and development alibi our successive government’s in...

This week I read the news story of a Burmese man called Myint Naing who got reunited with his family after 22 long years. He had been tricked by a broker offering a job in Thailand in 1993, when he was only 19 years old and desperate for money. But instead he ended up being sold to become one of the approximately 200,000 slaves working in the Asian fishing industry. His escape brought back memories of a book named Papillon, which narrated an enduring escape story from Devil’s Island in French Guiana by a convict called Henri Charriere. The escape of Myint from his captivators must have been no less daring. But he was neither a convict nor will he be able to make millions selling the rights of his story. Despite that Myint is luckier than those left behind. Slavery is not new to this world and African slave trade is one such example, where people were caught, herded as cattle to be bought and sold as slaves to the western households and farms.  The Church of England issu...